U.S. Navy doctors bring healthcare to isolated Brazilian communities in the Amazon

We enjoyed this a piece just published at defense.gov on a U.S.-Brazilian humanitarian medical mission:

Five Navy doctors recently boarded the Brazilian navy hospital ship and began a monthlong humanitarian mission that will take them deep into the Amazon. These U.S. doctors are working closely with the Brazilian navy to deliver healthcare to some of the isolated peoples in the world.

Besides providing direct care to isolated populations without routine access to medical facilities, the doctors are seeking to create sustainable improvements by developing a curriculum on delivering healthcare to the isolated communities along the Amazon.

The mission’s medical planner, Navy Captain William Scouten, said that the curriculum will serve as a living document that will be revised over time to reflect developments in disease prevalence, technology and educational priorities.

Captain Scouten expressed ambitious goals for the future of the program:

“The long-range goal here is to provide the indigenous population with a broader array of healthcare that they might not have received otherwise,” he said. “Hopefully, with all the data that we have been able to collect and will collect, we could be able to identify specific pathologies, perhaps eradicating, or at least mitigating some of them.”